Concerto Pour la Main Gauche
I’m listening to the concerto
for the left hand that Wagner
wrote for Wittgenstein, not Ludwig,
but his brother, the concert
pianist, who lost his right arm
in the first World War. The song
is bold and fast, showing strength,
of the remaining function,
no doubt a demonstration of national,
Austrian pride, but no-matter
how skilled, it is hard to cloak
the song was built around absence.
My step-father has this nightmare
of pair of polished black shoes,
alone, in a whitish, ethereal plane.
It’s not that the shoes are
conspicuously empty, that wakes
him – it is that they, in an uncanny
moment, begin walking.
Sometimes I hear the right hand
playing beyond authorship and it
keeps me awake at night.
I live by the beach now and the waves,
Almost like concurrent knives,
strike the dark. And I think of
the summer I broke down, convinced
the world might be a spoon in
a Rube Goldberg machine
Walking the scrub-brush beyond
the stables—feeling something too
verdant, too overgrown in
the landscape, how the grass-
hoppers were large and brown
and looked like keys.
Last Poem in a Book
What the lord giveth the lord
taketh away: He’s a real
ass that way—always acting
like your mother, calling you
from the living with that voice
used when you forgot your chores,
or sticking you in a cloud,
for no reason, no good reason,
no blackberries, or black
licorice, no more moments
on a cliffside. I like
the Ptolemaic view of
the heavens with Earth
as the center of corruption
refined through every sphere,
until on the final track—
the purest music, like
the ambient sound on
the last inch of a record.
I’d rather clap along
with that tune than think of
space, I know I sound high,
when I say we’re all small,
but cut me some slack, it’s hard
to laugh off after a while,
feeling small. But I’ve been
trying. I’ve been trying
when I go to the beach
at night and hear it knock
on the land, to get comfortable
with leaving this world, this
ocean, these trees, the long
wheat grass, having hardly
touched a thing.
